‘They are shooting at a church’: Inside the 15-hour siege by Nicaraguan paramilitaries on university students

MANAGUA, Nicaragua — The first student I met outside the Church of the Divine Mercy had a fresh bullet hole in his lower back.

“It’s ugly in there,” he said.

“In there” was the vast, jungly campus of the National Autonomous University of Nicaragua (UNAN), which by Friday afternoon had become a battleground. Far from the initial fighting was the Catholic church, a supposedly safe place for triage, and beleaguered and wounded students were arriving from the front lines by pickup truck, by motorbike and on foot.

“We had to evacuate,” Jonas Cruz, 18, said. “They are invading the barricades. They are already inside.”